About Roger Hudson.
Dublin. We have an Edwardian terraced house with a long garden within walking distance of the town centre and transport facilities. It was a walled town,
so at the end of our road is the only surviving medieval barbican in Ireland, a magnificent beast called St. Lawrence Gate. A few miles up the River Boyne is Newgrange, the oldest man-made structure in Europe, older than the pyramids.
The site of the Battle of the Boyne is near there, Oliver Cromwell is still detested for his brutal massacre when he broke the siege here, and the head of another Oliver, St. Oliver Plunkett, is a somewhat gruesome relic in St. Peter's Catholic Church.
The people here are very friendly and I have been active in the local creative writing group, Drogheda Creative Writers, and in organising events for them, such as the Amergin Creative Writing Awards and a very successful poetry slam last year. DCW also published an anthology Drogheda Writes and, more recently, Drogheda Writes 2 both co-edited by me and packed with poems, stories and memoirs of pleasingly high calibre by local writers.
However, I am involved with our older son Simon in a small and struggling film and TV production and distribution company in Dublin, which robs me of writing time, though some reading research and even scribbling gets done while commuting. Our younger son has a growing telecoms business in St. Albans. They each have one gorgeous daughter 2-years and 9-years respectively. Latest arrival is baby Oisin in Dublin.
How I got to here is a complicated story. I grew up in Bramley, a country village in Surrey near Guildford, as an evacuee from London during World War II. I went to the village primary school across the road, passed the very new 11-plus exam to enter the Royal Grammar School in Guildford, a very dark gloomy Tudor building. Early encounters with detection were Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels and Norman and Henry Bones the boy detectives on BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour. Early writing included tapping out a science fiction story on an ancient one-key, one-character-at-a-time revolving-drum typewriter. I did National Service in the RAF, serving as a photographer in a fighter squadron in Germany and was released two weeks early to go to University College London to read Economics.
That was 1956 so it was a knockout time. The Suez and Hungary protests were on,
it was the skiffle, jazz, coffee bar era and the start of rock & roll, the time of Angry Young Men in literature, Kitchen Sink drama and Theatre of the Absurd in theatre, and the French Nouvelle Vague in cinema. We had a whale of a time and in those days a county major scholarship was enough to live on. I did come out with an honours degree but most of my education was from working on the college newspaper, dramatic society, film society and being on the students union council.
My big mistake then was not having a one-track career plan but wanting to do everything, so I ended up doing a bit of a lot of things. Looking back, it was mainly work in different forms of writing and editing from journalism to technical editing, publicity to scripts for corporate videos, information and careers literature with occasional attempts to break into the film industry. This was supplemented by a lot of unpaid work in my spare time running an amateur theatre and in community organisations. Various fiction and non-fiction books were mooted and even part-written but put aside for pressure of earning a living.
So I met a lot of people and accumulated masses of experience of how industry and society operates and that’s something that comes in pretty handy when writing a novel even an historical one.
With our sons grown up, about 16 years ago we decided that London was too big and unmanageable and dirty and car-dominated, so we moved to inner-city Dublin, where my wife grew up. That was fine, much more relaxed and I was able to take time for some solid writing - Death Comes by Amphora was one of the results, though it has gone through considerable changes since that first draft. But then Dublin started trying to imitate London, so we moved seven years ago to Drogheda. Now Drogheda has expanded rapidly as a Dublin commuter base, though the recession has put a temporary halt to that, and is trying to be like Dublin but is still very friendly.
Work is now proceeding on the sequel, provisionally titled Fraud Under the Akropolis, necessitating fresh research into some of the amazing personalities who arrived in Athens at this time and the complex political machinations going on. I am a member of the Crime Writers Association and of the Classical Association of Ireland and have dual Irish/British nationality
